anorexia

I didn’t sleep much last night. I’d agreed to go on the Today programme at 07.40 to give my perspective on this week’s coverage of the terrible plane crash in the Alps, particularly the implications that it was caused by someone with depression.

I only came out about my own experiences of depression a year and a half ago, even though it has come – and gone – since I was 15. I’m not unusual; 75% of mental illnesses start before the age of 18. I’m also not unusual to be shy about sharing. There is still massive stigma. Including self-stigma, in which I am an expert.

Very gradually, things have become easier for the 1:4 people who experience mental illness, through campaigns such as Time to Change. Or so we thought.

I’m not going to repeat how disgracefully the majority of the print and even broadcast media have behaved this week. Others including Matt Haig, my 17 year old Twitter friend Stella and Stephanie Boland have done so much better than me.

And deepest thanks to Paul Farmer, CE of Mind, Sue Baker, Director of Time to Change and Professor Sir Simon Wessely, President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists for being so quick off the mark and setting the record straight. They have done a stunning job.

What I want to say is that, every time I have an opportunity to speak about the stigma that still affects people like me, I feel a little more nervous. It is an increasingly heavy burden of responsibility. For some, the impact of their mental illness means they lack the voice and opportunity to speak for themselves. They have to rely on others. And that means those of us who can must act with great sensitivity and respect. Including towards those who have lost someone to suicide, anorexia or lack of self-care.

Mental illnesses, by definition, mess with your head. They make you believe horrible, negative things about yourself, question your worth and the very point of your existence, and cause you to feel hopeless about the future. In some cases, people lose touch with reality. They hurt themselves, either deliberately or by failing to take due care. It is rare that they hurt other people. Far more rare than people who are NOT mentally ill hurting others.

There are other illnesses that carry stigma, but mental illnesses are in a class of their own. The media coverage this week may have set matters back.

But what gives me hope is that after speaking on the radio, I have heard from hundreds of people I didn’t previously know via social media. Many are like me, timidly but courageously speaking up about their own experiences in order to encourage people who are ashamed of their mental illness to seek help.

Together, we can metaphorically hold hands, step forward together and show that we aren’t murderous monsters. And that, with love, support and most of all our own courage, we can make a creative and compassionate contribution to the world.

Thank you to all my old and new friends. I think we are pretty amazing.

One effect of antidepressants is to knock the top and bottom from one’s emotional range. After dark weeks of despair, self-loathing and nothingness of my most recent depression, I welcomed this. It was a relief to feel calm, even blunted.

Now I’m on a reducing dose of medication, I notice a gradual return to a more responsive emotional state. I’m more joyful, sometimes a little more anxious. And I find myself getting angry again about things that matter to me.

The current system isn’t working. But we need to understand how we reached this position, or we risk not improving things far enough, even at all.

CAMHs staff are, almost without exception, amazing people. They don’t look after one patient at a time. They deal with the complications of whole families. They have extraordinary skills, vocation, patience and perseverance plus bucket loads of compassion. But across the country, many are fed up with being blamed for failing children and young people. Because they aren’t failing them. We all are.

The current “commissioning” arrangements could not have been more badly designed unless they were intended to be poor value and counter-productive. It is unacceptable that the different “Tiers” of care are purchased by unrelated parts of the so-called “system”. And that when children fall between the gaps, it is the clinical staff and their employers who face the blame.

Local authorities are under even greater financial challenge than the NHS. Many have made massive cuts to the first line, lower tiers of these services, or made them even harder to access than the higher, NHS tiers. Yet their members sit, by statute, in judgement of the NHS through Health Overview and Scrutiny Committees. Watch me and colleagues participating in this arrangement at Kent County Council a year ago, during which time one councillor publicly suggested that commissioners had set up the trust and staff I then led to fail.

Commissioners of such services have in many cases not been given the chance to argue for increases in resources, or even to defend the services they commission from cuts. Some have even felt the need to assert that providers were exaggerating the now-proven, substantial national increase in referrals. The causes are multi-faceted.

In many unrelated parts of England, services are inundated and can’t cope. Crises occur daily and children wait in police cells to be assessed by hard – pressed clinicians who know there are no beds available anywhere in the country even if the child is in desperate need of admission.

3 useful facts:

Anorexia isn’t a young person’s lifestyle choice. It is a serious mental illness that, without effective treatment, carries a 30% mortality rate.

Psychosis is like cancer. The earlier it is diagnosed and treated, the better your prognosis and the least likely it is to recur. The same is true for most other serious mental illnesses.

75% of mental illnesses start before the age of 18. Like my depression

My 8-point plan for NHS England

Do not ask management consultants or experts in commissioning to design solutions. Ask the people who know. The ones who work in and run these services

Stop setting organisations against each other by competitive tendering. This may be OK when you have time, but with this, you don’t.

Commission one local statutory organisation in each area under the greatest pressure to be the system leader for all aspects of CAMHs except secure care, with commissioners working within the local system. Avoid competition challenges by declaring an emergency, setting targets for engagement with CCGs and GPs, and requiring the lower tiers to be expanded and provided outside the NHS, either directly by schools and/or the not-for-profit sector. Do this for long enough to allow things to settle and thrive, ie a minimum of five years.

Don’t allow anything to cloud your judgement. It isn’t social care good, NHS care bad. Or vice versa. CAMHs teams should be multi-disciplinary and multi-agency. Parents and children don’t care who staff work for. What they care about is getting help that is responsive and effective.

Carefully consider secure services for children and young people. Are they good value? Clinically effective? Compassionate? Safe? And are children in these services only because there are insufficient non-secure services? Only national commissioners can do this.

Work as hard with the next government for increased funding for CAMHs as you would for heart disease or cancer care, were these services in an equally challenged state.

Celebrate the amazing staff who do this work. Encourage ministers, the media, CCGs, trusts, schools and the third sector to do the same.

Imagine what you would want for your children, were they suicidal, self-harming or hearing voices.